How to Get Started with AdWords for Small to Medium Size Businesses

If you are a small or medium-sized business, chances are you have thought about running an AdWords campaign. Getting started with this strategy can be a bit overwhelming at first as there’s a lot of uncertainties that are involved with setting up a successful campaign.

Having helped numerous clients implement successful AdWords campaigns, I have created a list of 3 things you should consider before executing a Paid Search Campaign. This will ensure that you run a successful campaign that doesn’t waste your advertising spend.

The Overall Goal of The Campaign

This is the most important step in creating an AdWords Campaign. I couldn’t tell you a time that I’ve asked a client to identify their goals when implementing an AdWords strategy and received a solid response.

For small and medium size businesses, there should be three main outcomes that you want from the campaign – 1. Awareness. 2. Leads 3. Sales. It’s important to understand which you want to target and create your campaigns accordingly. Having a solid goal in mind will determine which campaigns you want to run and ultimately the audience and budget needed to reach your goals.

What’s awesome about AdWords campaigns is that you can easily track your audience goals in tools such as Google Analytics (more on this to come). This allows you to monitor and analyze whether your campaigns are meeting your campaign goals.

Campaign Structure and Targeting

If you have any background in Adwords, you most likely know that there are different types of campaigns that you create within the interface. Specifically, you can set up Search Campaigns to target specific keywords or you can use Display features to post your ad on a variety of targeted websites or remarket your ads to users who already interacted with your site. It’s important to understand your business and budget to determine which of these campaign types would work for you.

For small and medium businesses, we usually recommend starting off with a targeted Search Campaign and running Remarketing simultaneously. This ensures that we’re not spending a lot of the budget and allows us to determine which campaigns are working better than others. It’s important to note that these campaigns often work together in driving users (and ultimately leads) to your website. That said, if you have a bigger budget and ultimately want to raise brand awareness, you might want to run multiple campaign types to get your name out there – it all depends on your goals.

In addition, it’s important to understand which locations you want to target with your ads. Google AdWords allows you to drill down into specific geographical locations so that your ads will only show to specific users in these regions. Again, if you are starting with a low budget and are a brick and mortar store, you might want to target locations around your business. If you are an ecommerce store, you might want to target the United States or separate countries.

Analyzing Results

This is just as important as identifying campaign goals. The best part about running AdWords campaigns is that the AdWords interface has a reporting system that tells you all about campaign performance. Some key metrics are

Clicks

Impressions

Click Through Rate

Avg. Position

Avg. Cost Per Click

Quality Score

This allows you to monitor your budget and how users are interacting with your ads on a daily basis. It’s important to note that an optimized campaign should expect the Avg. Cost Per Click to drop on a monthly basis as making changes to better target Google users results in lower ad spend.

In addition, AdWords can easily be linked to Google Analytics for advanced reporting features. Specifically, Google Analytics can tell you all about how these AdWords users are interacting with your website. THIS IS HUGE WHEN LAUNCHING MARKETING CAMPAIGNS! Why? Because you can constantly see how users from these campaigns are contributing to your bottom line. Analytics allows you to see which of these users are contributing to business goals such as filling out a contact us form, requesting a quote, or ultimately purchasing products if you are an ecommerce store.

It’s important to leverage the AdWords interface as well as Google Analytics and analyze performance monthly. Knowing which campaigns are contributing to your company goals and which are not allows you to make appropriate changes as well as ensures that your advertising budget is helping the goals of your company.